Architecture and Social Reform in Sir Gangā Rām’s Institutions for Women in Colonial Lahore, c. 1915–1947

Abstract

Between 1915 and the early 1930s the Punjab engineer and philanthropist Sir Gangā Rām founded and endowed a group of institutions in Lahore for Hindu and Sikh widows and for the education of girls: a Widow Remarriage Association, a Hindu Widows’ Home with an attached normal and industrial school, and a first-class secondary school for girls, to which a separate private high school was later added under his Trust. Existing scholarship has described these buildings singly and admired their façades. This article reads them together, as one graduated plan whose spaces were arranged to move a widow from customary seclusion toward salaried work as a teacher. Reform, on this account, was not confined to statute and sermon; it was given material form, and the buildings carried out part of the labor that reform required. Drawing on recent readings of the colonial city as a joint undertaking of the state and an Indian elite, and on Foucault’s writing on enclosed and set-apart space, the article also asks what became of this reform architecture once the community it served departed at Partition. It offers one of the first accounts of the widow question in Punjab conducted through architecture rather than through law and text.